


While the Music Lasts

by DonnesCafe



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Advent, Angst, F/M, Love, M/M, Post HLV, Post-Season/Series 03A AU, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Secret Intelligence Service | MI6
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-16
Updated: 2014-12-16
Packaged: 2018-03-01 19:31:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2785061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DonnesCafe/pseuds/DonnesCafe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A post-HLV AU in which Moriarty's image did not appear on all those screens and Sherlock goes undercover in Eastern Europe. He's managed to stay alive almost a year - this begins at the end of November, 2015. An advent meditation of sorts on love, sacrifice, hope -- mashup of fic, theology, Sherlock, and T.S. Eliot (so may or may not be your cup of tea). Yeah.</p>
            </blockquote>





	While the Music Lasts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tammany](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/gifts).



_Words move, music moves_  
 _Only in time; but that which is only living_  
 _Can only die…_  
 _Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,_  
 _Not that only, but the co-existence,_  
 _Or say that the end precedes the beginning,_  
 _And the end and the beginning were always there…_  


~~T.S. Eliot, “Four Quartets: Burnt Norton” 

**First Sunday in Advent. November 29, 2015.**

**I. Time present and time past. Molly.**

Pale skin. Dark, curly hair. She looked down at the body. So like Sherlock. Much younger, of course, like a Sherlock she had never known but a Sherlock that might have been. She looked at the needle tracks on the still, white arms and felt tears prick behind her eyelids. That wouldn’t do at all. She picked up a scalpel and paused for a moment before the first incision. No-one knew she did this. She wasn’t a church-goer, but she had been raised C of E. _Rest eternal grant to him, O Lord._ She always whispered that in her own mind before she made the first cut. And she always heard the response from the communion of saints she still, somehow, believed in. _And let light perpetual shine upon him._

The scalpel still hovered. She actually hadn’t thought of Sherlock in a day or two. It had, after all, been almost a year since he left England after that horrible Christmas. John just shrugged when she asked where he was, how he was. She wasn’t even sure he was alive, whether John himself knew one way or the other. Just for good measure, she said another scrap of a prayer, barely remembered, suitable for the living or the dead. She wasn’t sure she had gotten all the words right, but it would do. 

_For none of us has life in himself,_  
 _And none becomes his own master when he dies._  
 _For if we have life, we are alive in the Lord,_  
 _And if we die, we die in the Lord._  
 _So, then, whether we live or die,_  
 _We are the Lord’s possession._  


Her hand steady, she set the tip of the scalpel down on the young man’s right shoulder and began the long, neat cut down toward the center of the sternum. 

**II. There the dance is. Janine.**

She moved smoothly through the stages, crouching for cover, then shooting on the run. Threat, double-tap. Non-threat. Cover. Non-threat. Threat around the barrier. Head shot. Pivot. Cover. It was almost like a dance, although a more deadly one than she had envisioned when Sherlock told her on John and Mary’s wedding night that she needed to practice. Wanker. She still felt a pang of regret about how all that turned out. Not just about the lies or Magnussen’s death. She couldn’t actually say she regretted that snake’s death. As angry as she was at Sherlock’s deceit, she still felt a lingering sense of affection. Of possibility. Damn the man. 

The buzzer sounded. She was improving. She had finished all the stages ahead of time and, if she wasn’t mistaken, almost flawlessly. This dance was courtesy of Sherlock’s older brother. She popped out the magazine and holstered the P99. Mycroft recruited her after the tabloid furor died down a bit. 

There had been a knock on her cottage door in Sussex one day in February. Although she had never seen Mike… Mycroft… before, she had known immediately who he was. Poker-up-the-ass expression, Saville row suit under an elegant overcoat, umbrella even though the day was sunny. 

“Tea?” she had said. And that was that. She actually liked the man in a strange way. Although she was set for a while financially, courtesy of the tabloids, the day-in-day-out of life in Sussex bored her. Mycroft explained that he admired her intelligence and her enterprise. He thought MI5 could use her. If she liked it, perhaps MI6 later. 

“You don’t owe me anything,” she had said. “I got my own back, fair and square. It has nothing to do with you.” It cost her a bit to say that because, if Mycroft was the British Government as Sherlock had hinted, it was tempting to be owed by him. But she was a fair-minded woman. 

“I simply like to recruit talent where I observe it,” he had said, sipping demurely at his Darjeeling. 

Her skin crawled a bit at the notion of him observing her, but she was restless. She saw a tiny, secret smile on his face. More to it, then. She was intrigued. What the hell. She trusted her instincts. 

“Sure, why not,” she had said. “When do I start?” 

Immediately, as it turned out. FIT, Foundation Investigative Training, had taken six months. Weapons training, investigative, operational, surveillance. She had done supervised assignments in Yorkshire and Northern Ireland. She was no longer bored. Or unemployed. And she had Sherlock to thank, she supposed. She wondered if he was still alive. 

She had seen Mycroft once since he had recruited her. She had been brought by a discreet black car to his office for tea. 

“Turn about,” he had said, pouring Lapsang from an elegant silver tea service perched on his expansive, preternaturally neat desk. “Are you enjoying your training?” 

“Ta,” she had said, “It’s brilliant.” 

“I thought it would suit you. I just thought I’d check in, although it would be better if we were not seen together. Otherwise, I would have treated you to tea at my club.” 

“Is he alive?” 

“Thus far,” was all he would say. Something in his shuttered expression had warned her not to ask anything else about Sherlock. He passed a plate of biscuits, and the conversations had turned to her experiences in Northern Ireland. 

Now it was late November, and she still wondered if he was alive. It was the first Sunday in Advent. She still had some of the vestiges of her childhood faith about her. Raised Catholic, she wasn’t sure she believed any of it, but she still went to church occasionally, sang the hymns, lit candles. Advent was a time of waiting, suspended in time, expecting and hoping for something. She’d light a candle and pray for the tosser. 

**III. Descend lower. Sherlock.**  


He lit a candle and knelt in a pew toward the back. Kisha Zemra e Krishtit. His Albanian was rudimentary, but the words he did know combined with the dreadful fresco behind the altar indicated that he had found the right church. Heart of Christ. Why she wanted to meet there was beyond him. 

Earta slipped into the pew, knelt beside him, crossed herself. 

“Oh, please,” Sherlock whispered, not looking at her. His head was also bowed. “Why here?” 

There was chanting from a choir up front. A priest censed the altar. The church was crowded. Good cover, he grudgingly admitted to himself. 

“My church. Sunday. Two birds as you English say, yes?” Her voice was a barely discernable murmur that then trailed off into Albanian that he couldn’t exactly follow. She actually seemed to be praying. He supposed that her position in the _mafia Shqiptare_ didn’t preclude religious superstition. 

She crossed herself again and stood. She seemed to sway while getting to her feet. He assumed she put the drive in his pocket, although he didn’t feel anything. He fixed his eyes on the fresco in what he hoped was a devout manner. 

He had promised her sanctuary in England in exchange for information. He had stumbled across hints that the Albanian mafia was planning to kidnap someone in the British royal family for ransom. Ambitious of them, but they had succeeded in kidnapping the Belgian Prime Minister over twenty years ago. He had been released unharmed after a ransom was paid. The amount had never been disclosed, but Mycroft would know. 

The Xhakja clan had a large, and growing, presence in prostitution, drugs, and human trafficking in the U.K. Apparently now they were branching out to kidnapping and wanted to start with something splashy. Something that could go very wrong. 

His knees hurt. Sense memory was a strange thing. Kneeling, incense. Chapel at school. The smell of hypocrisy and loneliness. Words empty of meaning. The music raised the same obscure longing in him that it had then, ruthlessly pushed down and deeply resented. Further back, a child in Hampshire. They weren’t, any of them, believers, but they had for some reason gone to church when he was a small child. His first memories of what he later came to call beauty had been the stained glass, the glow of the candles, something unspoken, unspeakable, hanging in the air under the stone arches that promised, then betrayed. He had grown out of fancies empty of meaning early on. 

Suddenly everyone in the congregation sat back in their pews. He did the same. One of the priests mounted an ornately carved, elevated pulpit and began to speak. As the babble of mostly unfamiliar words washed over him, he looked at the fresco. Terrible art. The figure had his white robe pulled aside, pointing out the violent red of his own bleeding heart, pierced by a circlet of thorns. Ludicrous. Something about the eyes drew him in, though. The man looked so tired, like someone tried far beyond the point of endurance who had to keep going anyway. 

He closed his eyes and sagged against the hard wood of the pew. He had outlived Mycroft’s prediction. He wasn’t quite sure why he kept struggling to survive. They were all waiting for him to die. Dreading it, of course, but waiting. They were all suspended, as was he. He was so very tired. 

**IV. Time and bell have buried the day. Mrs. Hudson.**

She stood at the kitchen sink, washing up the tea things. She looked out the window, hands stilled on a cup. Late afternoon, dark clouds over the sun. She could hear the church bells from Marylebone. She hadn’t been to church in donkey’s years, but she liked the bells. 

She looked down at the teacup and thought of Sherlock. No-one would tell her anything. Tendrils of memory. The lights around the mantelpiece in the now-empty flat above her. Sherlock playing “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” on the violin. It was less than a month to Christmas now. She wondered where he was. She put the cup in the drainer and dried her hands. She wasn’t Catholic. She wasn’t anything, really. St. Marylebone’s was close, though. She might go say a prayer for Sherlock. There was nothing else she could do. 

**V. Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts. Greg and Mycroft.**

“For God’s sake, turn that off.” 

Greg looked up from the marble counter where he was chopping peppers and onions for an omelette. Mycroft stood in the door to the kitchen in his elegant silk dressing gown. His face was white. 

Greg wiped his hands on a kitchen towel and turned off the CD player beside him. 

“Sorry, love,” he said. “Did I wake you?” 

Mycroft shook his head. Didn’t move. 

I’m a detective, Lestrade thought to himself, I can figure this out. Mycroft didn’t like Christmas? Christmas music? Music with brunch? They had only been together three months, so he didn’t really know how his lover felt about Christmas. Minefield, maybe? People could be funny about holidays. 

Mycroft crossed the room and sat down heavily at the old farmhouse table that dominated the space. Greg looked down at the peppers and onions on the cutting board and tried to think. Something about the music. It was just a collection of traditional Christmas instrumentals. He had thought it time to get into the spirit, since he loved Christmas. What had been playing when Mycroft came in? Lestrade had only had it on as background while he fixed a celebratory brunch. It was Sunday, and neither of them had to work today. 

Oh, hell, he thought. Hell. What had been playing was “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.” A lyrical, solo violin. 

He went and sat down by Mycroft. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think.” 

Mycroft shrugged. He was looking out the window into the garden, bare and grey under the pale morning sun. 

“I…,” he started. Stopped. Greg ventured to put a hand out, inviting but not demanding, on the scarred wood of the oak table. Mycroft didn’t take it. 

“Sometimes I actually wish…” 

Silence again. “You wish what?” Greg asked softly. 

“It’s terrible,” Mycroft said, still not looking away from the window. “You wish it was over,” Greg ventured. 

“God help me,” Mycroft said, finally turning, his eyes ravaged. “The waiting is agonizing. Every day I expect to hear that he’s dead. I thought this was kinder. That there would be some chance. Not that he could come… home… but that they would settle for a permanent exile.” 

“And?” 

“They wanted him dead or in prison. Those were roughly equivalent for Sherlock. They settled for him dying in the service of Queen and country. Preferably sooner rather than later.” Mycroft’s voice was bitter. 

“It’s been almost a year, Mycroft. You’re one of the most influential men in England. Why can’t you bring him home?” 

“Justice? That’s what I keep telling myself. That’s what my… associates keep telling me. It was murder. Murder of an influential man. Publicly. In cold blood.” 

“He was slime, Mycroft.” 

“Yes, he was. Unfortunately, that’s still not a capital crime.” 

“I thought you were buddies with the Queen. Can’t she pardon him?” 

Mycroft grimaced. He looked back down, started fiddling with a heavy, monogrammed silver fork that was part of the place setting Greg had laid out. “She is being rather unbending about this. Neither of us can be seen to condone cold-blooded murder. We have to be above favoritism.” 

Lestrade had tried not to inquire too closely into Mycroft’s position and duties as their relationship developed, but sometimes he got tired of hearing about duty. 

“Don’t you order people killed, directly or indirectly? People you have decided need to die? Or deserve to die? I’m guessing they all aren’t tried by a jury of their peers.” 

“That’s different.” Mycroft voice was tight. The tines of the fork were now digging into the wood, adding new scars to the old surface. 

“Yeah? I’ve had to kill people, too, you know. I’m not proud of it. Sherlock just didn’t have our cover, did he? He let his heart rule his head, the daft bugger. Do I think he did the right thing? Hell, no. Do I think he deserves to die? Mycroft, look at me.” 

Mycroft finally meet his eyes. “Bring him home. Before he really does get killed out there. He’s on borrowed time already.” 

“I can’t.” 

Greg stood, grabbed his coat, and went out into the garden before he said something he’d regret.

**Author's Note:**

> This may be one of the stranger things I've written. The seed was some discussion comments on Tammany's Advent fic about whether/how/to what extent these people might be vestigially religious (or not) and what form it might take. This definitely went off at a tangent, so she bears no responsibility for this (but just wanted to hat-tip its beginning). I was interested in exploring some advent themes through the lens of these characters.


End file.
